The Times Union’s Bragg has performed a remarkable public service, illuminating Albany influence-peddling at the retail level, and underscoring the ethics deficit that has informed Kathy Hochul’s Albany tenure.
She was a second-tier player in Western New York when Andrew Cuomo — the prince of Albany pay-to-play — picked her for lieutenant governor in 2014. Whereupon two things swiftly happened: Her husband Bill, a former federal prosecutor with no obvious relevant experience, was named general counsel to Buffalo-based casino-entertainment giant Delaware North — and Delaware North began lobbying the lieutenant governor’s office.
Subsequently, Hochul engineered an $850 million taxpayer-funded cash bath for a pro football stadium in Buffalo — a deal from which, serendipitously or otherwise, Delaware North stands to make a bundle as the stadium’s concessions holder.
None of this appears to have been illegal, so perhaps it’s just further evidence of the Hochul administration aiming to serve — whomever.
But it’s definitely the Albany way. There’s so much discretionary “economic development” money floating around the capital city that shenanigans are inevitable. The second-most-powerful man in the Andrew Cuomo administration went to prison for development-related bribe-receiving. Plus federal prosecutors spent much of the former governor’s tenure probing look-alike schemes and scams up and down the Mohawk River-Hudson River corridors.
Hochul lived through much of this, so one would think she’d be sensitive to the optics of ethical corner-cutting — if not to its actual substance.
THIS IS ONE SNAKEBIT ADMINISTRATION: Viewers Noticed Something Off About Kamala Harris’ Interview in Louisiana. “Yep, whether it was Essence Fest or the West Wing that had final approval over the backdrop, the typo went unnoticed by everyone…until it was too late. There, as Harris and Palmer talked about the state of the country (more on that later), was LOUSIANA in giant letters over the vice president like the midterms loom over her party.”
Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong — presidents become incompetent at doing the things they were always able to do in their sleep, and their aides follow suit. I noted this when I wrote my first book, Hell of a Ride, about the decline and fall of the first President Bush, back in 1993. When Bush spoke, it rained, and his advancemen weren’t quick-thinking enough to move his events indoors. When he went to Japan on a state visit, he vomited. He was so intent on getting out his message of the day that he referred to it as “Message: I Care.”
But then, this presidency has been going wrong long before it even started.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: After 30+ Years, NPR Cancels Declaration of Independence Reading. “When will NPR decide to end its broadcasts altogether to make amends for its flawed founding? After all, that’s what NPR’s prescription is when it comes to the Declaration of Independence.”
This year, Americans have found it increasingly difficult to not notice that everything’s a lot more expensive than it was at this same time last year. Those infamous $0.16-off hotdogs now cost more than ever, along with the watermelon and corn and potato salad and ground beef and bread and clothes and gas and cars.
And thanks in no small part to the rising prices and costs for basic goods and services, the Democratic Party is on track to lose pretty big in November and Joe Biden’s poll numbers are on a plummeting downward trajectory. So dear old Robert decided yesterday to try to do the Dems a solid and echo one of Joe Biden’s favorite narratives and blame GrEeDy CoRpOrAtIoNs for all of it:
What AI shares with radical environmentalism is a longing to create an external moral arbiter. With apocalyptic climate change, the planet is judging us because we dared improve our lot. In AI’s Jesuit wing – transhumanism – man hasn’t fallen, we were just awful all along. Among transhumanists, there is a revulsion toward the physical body, which decays and defines a fixed form, and also a revulsion at what is characterised as our hopeless irrationality. We have always been inferior to the machines, they argue, but those machines just hadn’t been invented yet. By submitting to the machines, we become free, as Grimes’ 2018 single, ‘We Appreciate Power’, articulates:
‘People like to say that we’re insane
But AI will reward us when it reigns
Pledge allegiance to the world’s most powerful computer
Simulation: it’s the future.’
Here the religious overtones are explicit – immortality is achieved by digitising the physical and uploading it. The deeply misanthropic idea that humans are not unique, and are in fact a bit rubbish, is not a new invention of the AI evangelists, of course. It has become commonplace in fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science to argue that consciousness is a trick of the mind, that the subjective self is an illusion or a trick of the brain circuitry. Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett was making this case three decades ago. A parallel, materialist view is even older: the proposition that we’re just poorly functioning machinery was expressed by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, where he wrote: ‘You, dear human, are simply a gigantic lumbering robot.’
In the early 2000s, computer pioneer and technology critic Jaron Lanier recognised these two beliefs as two cheeks of the same backside – a backside he called ‘cybernetic totalism’. He was dismayed that so many highly intelligent friends of his in science and technology were sympathetic to this collection of prejudices, in part or in whole. Of the six characteristics he identified of this worldview, one was that ‘subjective experience either doesn’t exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect’. Subjectivity has long been unfashionable among the intelligentsia, as James Heartfield identified in The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained in 2002. Twentieth-century literary fashions like structuralism, cognitive science and more recently behavioural science merely added some intellectual respectability to these prejudices.
Two decades ago, Lanier already had an explanation for the supposedly ‘magical’ and ‘emergent’ properties of today’s AI. ‘To make the computers look smart, we have to make ourselves stupid’, he observed. It requires a curious act of self-abasement. Unfortunately, abasing ourselves is a habit to which our elites seem strangely addicted. Hollowing out what it means to be human has cleared the path for both artificial intelligence and apocalyptic environmentalism, two of the most powerful religions of the 21st century.
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)
For Peterson – if I understand him correctly, having watched a fair number of his videos – the important thing here is not what he calls Page. It’s why. We all are being required to acquiesce in what Peterson considers the fiction that [Ellen/Elliot] Page is a man and always was. Certainly the latter – that Page was born a man and has always been a man – is something manifestly untrue except in woke circles and I suppose in Page’s mind. But everyone is now required to agree with the narrative, and Peterson thinks there’s a big cost in agreeing.
There is a cost, indeed.
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s I noticed this new (to me, anyway) tendency to insist that subjective beliefs should hold sway over objective ones, and that in fact there was no such thing as objective truth. Sorry, I don’t buy that. Maybe there isn’t absolute and definitive truth, but some things are a lot truthier than others and someone like Peterson should be allowed to say so without being thrown off Twitter.
Michael Lopez, a production coordinator at Universal Music Enterprises, blasted the company as “anti-gay” for terminating a “queer brown person” during Pride Month for “speaking up in defense of abortion rights,” according to a lengthy note on LinkedIn that went viral last week.
“Last Friday, like countless other folks, I was devastated by the news of the supreme court’s [sic] attack on abortion rights,” Lopez wrote.
“Paired with the flood of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation, it’s been hard to process how company’s [sic] expect us to be productive while our rights are being stripped away.”
Lopez then went on to explain that each Friday “one of my tasks was to process reports for upcoming releases” and then to email his work to 275 people.
But instead of doing the usual process reports, he wrote an email that read: “I didn’t do them today.”
“I’m in mourning due to the attack on people with uteruses in the US. Federally guaranteed access to abortion is gone,” the email continued.
* * * * * * * *
Lopez’s note on LinkedIn went viral, generating more than 3,200 reactions, some 250 comments and more than 60 shares.
While some commenters were supportive, others were less sympathetic.
One LinkedIn user called Lopez “entitled, lazy, and obviously ignorant,” writing: “Yeah this is pretty pathetic…You a grown man pretending to have ‘grief’ so unbelievably unbearable over something that will never affect you in any way that you can’t perform a simple task at work.”
Another LinkedIn commenter wrote: “If you just sent the report like they asked every Friday… would you have lost your job? Most likely no.”
The commenter added: “You didn’t lose your job based on your color or sexual orientation so please stop thinking that. Your actions are childish cause for termination.”
The City of Orlando issued a statement Saturday after sending out a promotion for the city’s fireworks display which claimed that people “probably” don’t want to celebrate because America is full of “hate,” and adding “we can’t blame them.”
The municipality’s City News email on Friday opened with a downer premise, an appeal to come on out to see fireworks for their own sake, despite there being nothing good to like about the United States.
The official email’s entire pitch was focused on the idea of not wanting to celebrate the United States, which is what the backlash was focused on despite the Orlando Sentinel inexplicably downplaying it as merely being about “mentioning division.”
“A lot of people probably don’t want to celebrate our nation right now, and we can’t blame them. When there is so much division, hate and unrest, why on earth would you want to have a party celebrating any of it?” the email began.
I’m not sure if going full Weimar is a winning message for the left with the midterms approaching, but then, there’s a reason why the late Roger Scruton dubbed it “the Culture of Repudiation.” “In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a ‘culture of repudiation.’ The Left is ‘negative.’ It dismisses ‘every aspect of our cultural capital’ with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of ‘racism,’ ‘xenophobia,’ ‘homophobia,’ and ‘sexism.’ Like 1984’s ‘two minutes of hate,’ this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.”
And what’s even worse, this bizarre phenomenon renders news stories [such as this Variety article] about “nonbinary” people almost indecipherable. Just look at this latest story about the ex-Flash actor going around the world being a violent lunatic:
The actor — best known for playing the DC superhero the Flash in several films for Warner Bros. — was set to start filming the studio’s latest entry in the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise, ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,’ in London when the shoot was halted on March 15, 2020, due to COVID. In the weeks after, Miller, who identifies as nonbinary and uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, became a regular at bars in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, where locals came to know and even befriend them. Many recognized Miller from their earliest breakout movies, 2012’s ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ and 2011’s ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin,’ where they played a troubled teen who brought a bow and arrow to school and murdered his classmates.
It’s a grammatical nightmare. “Many recognized Miller from their earliest breakout movies.” Oh, so those Icelanders worked with Miller on those movies? No, you see, “their” is supposed to refer to him.
And this part is just madness: “They played a troubled teen who brought a bow and arrow to school and murdered his classmates.” So it’s not “They murdered their classmates,” because the character he was playing wasn’t nonbinary? What is this gibberish?
Tom Hanks recently said he regrets playing a gay man in Philadelphia because he’s not gay. I always thought that was just called “acting,” but what do I know. If that’s the case, though, why should a nonbinary person be allowed to play a normal person?
And if I’m expected to use a criminal’s preferred pronouns, why can’t Rachel Dolezal call herself black? There’s less genetic difference between a white woman and a black woman than between any man and any woman.
How bad is the Variety article that Treacher quotes above? This bad:
U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday demanded oil companies explain why they aren’t putting more gasoline on the market, sharply escalating his rhetoric against industry as he faces pressure over rising prices.
Biden wrote to executives from Marathon Petroleum Corp, Valero Energy Corp, and Exxon Mobil Corp and complained they had cut back on oil refining to pad their profits, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters.
“At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Biden wrote, adding the lack of refining was driving gas prices up faster than oil prices.
“The lack of refining capacity – and resulting unprecedented refinery profit margins – are blunting the impact of the historic actions my Administration has taken to address Vladimir Putin’s Price Hike and are driving up costs for consumers.”
The letter is also being sent to Phillips 66, Chevron Corp, BP and Shell, a White House official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.
In the service of reducing carbon emissions, Democrats have long openly worked to raise the price of fossil fuel energy. They have done so by proposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, higher leasing fees, and other measures to jack up costs so people burn less of it. This is why Barack Obama said, in answer to a related question about electricity, that his energy plan would make prices “necessarily skyrocket.” This is why Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna praised BP’s CEO less than six months ago for pledging to reduce oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. Reductions in oil production and rising gasoline prices are part of the Democrats’ agenda and the Paris climate agenda.
There’s even more to it than that. Over the past decade, the Democrats’ overt hostility toward fossil fuels has even driven companies in the industry to sideline production, purely for public relations purposes, while prioritizing meaningless, politically correct carbon emissions goals. How can Democrats suddenly feign outrage at their incredible success in influencing the industry?
Is it a mystery why Democrats aren’t doing a sack dance and celebrating the salvation of planet earth?
There’s the small matter of their political survival, of course. It would be unseemly — like doing a jig at an Irish funeral — to celebrate other people’s pain. And it would cost many Democrats who are secretly jubilant about high gas prices their political careers.
Instead, Democrats are pretending to look for a way to “ease consumers’ pain.”
So despite Biden claiming today that high gas prices are Putin’s fault, is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
His tweet also garnered support from Chinese state media, with Chen Weihua, China Daily EU Bureau Chief, responding that Biden “finally realized that capitalism is all about exploitation.”
Biden’s tweet comes as gas prices are averaging at $4.822 nationwide, which is up over 20 cents from just one month ago.
Who could have seen praise from the CCP coming for Biden?
The new owners asked that the newspaper staff refrain from commenting on the pending litigation while settlement talks were ongoing. That’s standard and prudent in legal proceedings. You don’t want employees saying things that might become evidence at trial or disrupt the settlement negotiations.
The staff refused to follow instructions. For that, one was fired. Another quit, saying he had literally cried about being denied the “right” to say whatever he wanted to say in the newspaper, whenever he wanted to say it, regardless of the impact on the newspaper’s pending lawsuit and settlement negotiations.
OK, that’s how these things sort out. Bosses boss, children are childish, and crybabies cry. Life goes on.
But now it’s getting serious. A group of the Aspen progressive establishment – the leftist elite who control the town – recently sent a letter to the new owners demanding they reinstate the fired staff, publish the content (of dubious veracity) that was withheld while the litigation was pending, and promise that in the future they will follow the publishing diktats of the letter-signers. The letter to the newspaper and the newspaper’s reply are HERE.
The letter-signers include all five county commissioners, the mayor and a former mayor, numerous city councilmen from Aspen, Snowmass and nearby Basalt, and the challenger to the Republican representative for the Congressional District that includes Aspen. Every single one is a Democrat, as are over 70% of Aspen residents.
The letter-signers gave the newspaper owners two weeks to comply with their demands. If they don’t, then the letter-signers threaten “reactions.”
To make sure the newspaper owners get the message, the letter details the threatened “reactions.” They include:
“Directing our individual organizations to pull advertisements and notices from the paper; encouraging local businesses to do the same; refusing interviews with reporters at the Aspen Times; or calling for a boycott of the paper.”
This is astounding. Government officials explicitly referencing their government organizations are threatening to put a newspaper out of business as punishment for its editorial decisions about what to publish and when.
If these letter-signers as private citizens simply wanted to express their objections to the newspaper’s editorial decisions, fine. That’s what letters to the editor are for – to persuade or sometimes just to rant.
But they chose coordinated actions in their capacity as government officials to overtly threaten the existence of the newspaper.
The man who masterminded both successful presidential campaigns for former President Obama, strategist David Axelrod, has harsh words for the current Commander-in-Chief saying, “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control and he’s not in command.” Appearing on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” Thursday, he added, “so, you know, this is a very, very fraught environment for him right now.”
The first question that pops into my mind is, does this have Obama’s blessing? It’s hard to imagine that Axelrod, now a CNN commentator, would criticize the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer without running it first by his former boss. My second question is, how long does this guy want to work at CNN? Because if he keeps spouting off like this, he’s bound to upset some folks at the left-leaning network who have been covering for Biden since day one of his presidency. Paging Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy…
Axelrod didn’t stop there though, continuing to rip the president:
Inflation, no one president can control inflation, but it is a gale force wind right now. It’s affecting politics.
You heard him on gas prices today. He talks about the gas tax holiday, but he is not going to get the gas tax holiday and there are a lot of Americans who are skeptical about whether that would help.
It’s true that no one president can control inflation, but one can certainly exacerbate the problem with profligate spending. Biden’s out-of-control layouts include mega-bills like the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan providing for COVID relief. Throw in tens of billions more sent to Ukraine. Think all this might have something to do with inflation?
Don’t forget that Biden wanted to spend more—up to $5 trillion more on the Build Back Better bill, but was only stopped because he couldn’t get the votes. Imagine how much worse inflation would be had that behemoth made it through Congress.
At the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti answers the question: Who’s In Charge?
Every time I speak to a conservative audience, I am asked who is really in charge in the White House. My answer has been that the president is in command. After all, institutions take on the character of their leaders. If all the White House has to offer is excuses, if decisions are made either slowly or randomly, if the communications team and the president and vice president seem to live on different planets, if incompetence and mismanagement appear throughout the government, it is because the chief executive allows it. No conspiracy is required to explain the ineptitude. This is Joe Biden we are talking about.
Lately, though, I have been having second thoughts. Not that Barack Obama or Ron Klain or Dr. Jill are running the show in secret. What I have been wondering, instead, is whether anyone is leading the government at all. There is no power, either overt or covert, in or behind the throne. The throne is empty.
Think of the economy, the border, and Ukraine. From time to time, Biden addresses these issues. He may even answer questions about them. The White House sends out press releases describing its latest initiatives. Vice President Harris or the second gentleman pops up somewhere to talk about all the good she and he are doing.
Yet each of these elements—the president, his staff, his spokesperson, his vice president, his policy—comes across as disconnected, discombobulated, as if each inhabits a separate sphere of activity. Whether because of Biden’s age, or his weekend trips to Delaware, or years of remote work, or lower-level staff turnover, or a painstakingly slow decision-making process, or ideological stubbornness, or a lack of a strategic plan, this administration drifts from crisis to crisis, and from one bad headline to the next. And nothing improves.
And so the desperate stupes at CNNLOL came up with this beauty of a headline….
Who decides if the US is in a recession? Eight White economists you’ve never heard of
And the 1400 or so words that follow are all about undermining any upcoming declaration of a recession as illegitimate because white people….
There is a clear lack of racial diversity amongst the eight members, and NBER has never had a member who has been a racial minority, according to Gary Hoover, co-chair of the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession.
[…]
In recent years there has been a push by policymakers and the Biden administration to include more diverse thinking in economic analysis.
Janet Yellen, America’s first woman Treasury secretary and its first woman Fed chair, has argued that the lack of women and minority economists at the Federal Reserve and the federal government is a top priority. That lack of diversity, she said, skews viewpoints and limits the issues of discussion.
This is not an opinion piece—I mean, it is an opinion piece, obviously, but it’s presented as news.
This is how desperate the corporate media now are….
Thanks only to left-wing policies (profligate federal spending, green nonsense exploding energy prices, etc.), things are so objectively bad in America — and the corrupt media’s credibility and moral authority are so eroded — that all CNN can come up with is naked nihilism to push back on the coming declaration that the United States is officially in a recession—which will be an objective fact.
Next will be the early Obama-era trope which was updated slightly for the coronavirus lockdowns: Sure we’re in a recession, but think of how it’s benefiting the environment!
I’LL TAKE STORIES BETTER ANSWERED BY STEVE GREEN FOR $500, ALEX: Why We Drink — new video from Reason TV:
John Kerry, America’s first “special envoy for climate,” who seems to spend more time in those private planes than most of us do in bed, has a personal carbon footprint the size of Brooklyn and is well known for docking his $7 million yacht in neighboring Rhode Island to avoid a half million in taxes from his home state of Massachusetts.
I have a personal note of my own to add, having attended, for PJ Media, the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in the midst of the biggest blizzard I had ever encountered—and I went to college in New Hampshire.
I was sitting waiting for one of the panel discussions to begin when, to kill time, I casually addressed the man next to me, asking him where he was from.
“The Maldives,” he said. Amazing, I thought, because I had just read the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean were in danger of extinction, actually going completely under water, because of global warming.
So, trying to be polite, I commiserated with him about the peril to his homeland, but he just shrugged. “Is nothing,” he explained. “We put up sandbags against tide. We do every year. No problem.”
I looked at him non-plussed. “You came a long way. Why’re you here?”
He squinted at me, as if he thought I was either an idiot or I was kidding. “For the money,” he said flatly.
According to AAA gas price averages, the average price of gas for July 1 is $4.842 per gallon. In California, it’s at $6.270, several more cents higher than the next highest, which is Hawaii, at $5.612.
NBC Bay Area said that the annual gas tax in California, which is among the highest at 51 cents a gallon, is to pay for infrastructure projects:
The state uses the gas tax to fund different highway and road projects. Proponents argued keeping the increase, so, those projects can continue.
Some economists said the increase comes at a bad time.
“So, the problem isn’t that the gas tax is itself an overwhelming indignity, it’s that it comes on top of a whole series of indignities. There are a whole bunch of problems with the economy,” said Robert Chapman Wood, SJSU Global Economics Professor.
Sure enough, one bullet point reads: “Gas consumption is bad for the climate. Driving should be discouraged, not subsidized. One-fifth of global carbon dioxide omissions [sic] come from transportation, most of it from road vehicles.”
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) blamed Democrats in California running for Congress, noting that Assembly members Rudy Salas and Adam Gray had the chance to suspend the gas tax but were among those who voted against it. And while Jay Chen claims to be “committed to lowering costs for working Americans,” he hasn’t spoken out against the gas tax increase.
“Families are struggling to keep up with record-high gas prices and California Democrats are making it even worse,” said CLF Press Secretary Cally Perkins. “Californians have the highest gas prices in the nation and have only Democrats to blame for it.”
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